Turkestan

Johannes, the father of my father, owned a piece of land at the Afghanistan border. Probably he got it from the Tsar for fighting in the Russian army in the 1905 war against Japan. He had a cotton plantation and a fruit garden with apricot-, cherry-, plum- and almond-trees. Short before the Revolution, he found oil. He was expropriated with no compensation. He was lucky to escape with his wife and baby boy, my father. They fled to Tashkent. My grandmother was badly hurt, when a petrol cooker exploded; her arm was burnt and she died from an infection.

Johannes lived with his little boy in Tashkent until he died from Pellagria, a lack of B vitamins. They tried to live on basswood fruit because nobody gave them a piece of bread. He became a victim of the Tsarist politics to try and convert this old Turkish and muslim country into a Christian, Russian speaking part of the Russian empire. In the following civil war, 3 parties were fighting one another: Communists, Turkish Nationalists and the Tsarist party.

My father was put into the house of a Jew with a baltic wife, his name was Nemilov. There were more than 100.000 Jews in Tashkent at that time.